


origins: Cenn

by Lukra (49percentchanceofbees)



Series: The Fabulists & Storystop Inn [1]
Category: Flight Rising
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:21:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25436845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/49percentchanceofbees/pseuds/Lukra
Summary: The Fabulistsfinda lone wandererin the Shifting Expanse.
Series: The Fabulists & Storystop Inn [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1842466
Kudos: 1





	origins: Cenn

The discordant whispers, the unceasing hunger -- there really wasn’t much incentive for him to go to all the trouble of clawing his way back out of the inky black depths and wake up properly. Even without waking he had a vague hope that if he put consciousness off long enough, it would become a non-issue.

But that didn’t seem to be happening -- instead there was movement, light, noise, some kind of broth poured down his throat. Eventually the idea that other dragons had found him percolated through his darkened mind and caught his attention. If other dragons had found him, then -- then …

The exact consequences escaped him, but it did mean he had to wake up. It took him another interminable period of time to pry his eyelids open, and then he had to work out what he was seeing: a wooden roof, swaying with movement. He lay in a nest of blankets by the side of a narrow wooden room; after a while, the concept of a wagon occurred to him, or maybe a ship, but he didn’t hear any water, and the motion was more side-to-side than up-and-down. An airship, perhaps. There were small windows on the long sides of the rectangular room, but he was too low to the ground to look out.

His first step, then, would be to fix that. He tried to roll over and haul himself to his feet, only for one arm to give out under him, and then he vomited onto the blankets, an ooze so black that it seemed to suck the light and color from its surroundings.

Oh. Right. He wasn’t well.

Too weak to prop himself up, he collapsed into his own vomit, the sludge seeping into his hair and skin. He cried a little -- disgust and horror and mourning for the dragon he’d once been -- and the tears were black and oily as well. Only after trying to lift himself again and failing did it occur to him that there must be other people around -- someone had put him here, had fed him, and the wagon was still moving. Surely someone would appear soon. Their intentions might not be good -- hard experience had taught him that -- but they’d put too much care into him, and their well-kept wagon, to let him simply rot in it. At least they might clean him up a little.

Maybe he could speed that up. Though his voice was hoarse, little more than a rasp, he called, “Hello?”

A moment passed, then two. He closed his eyes. It would be nice to be unconscious again.

The door opened, and he hurriedly forced his eyes open and tried to push himself upright once again. He failed. The banescale standing in the doorway looked at him with narrowed eyes and said over her shoulder, “He’s awake, but you already knew that, didn’t you?”

A distant laugh.

“Please,” he breathed, unsure if he’d even spoken loud enough for her to hear. “Help me.”

The banescale stepped into the wagon and caught sight of the soiled blankets. She sighed and turned back again. “Frip, you’d better get in here and clean him up. I’m not touching that.”

He curled in on himself in a little, feeling small and disgusting and worthless.

The banescale came closer, though she maintained a good few feet of distance between them. Her voice softened a little. “Don’t know if you know this, but you’re Shade-tainted. Pretty badly. Frip says her spells will contain it, but, well, I’m not touching raw Shade. You have a name?”

Did he? He had to think about it for a long moment. No one had asked for it in a long time. “Cenn. I’m Cenn.”

“Cenn.” The banescale spoke the name as if rolling it over her tongue, testing how it tasted. He couldn’t tell if she liked it. “I’m Adragna. We found you in the Shifting Expanse. Were you trying to get somewhere? Somewhere we can take you?”

“No.” He only remembered trying to get  _ away _ .

Adragna clicked her tongue, but she looked like she’d expected this answer. “Well, we can’t exactly take you home with us. But we’ll figure out something, if Frip can truly keep you from infecting the rest of us.”

“Oh ye of little faith.” A nocturne entered the room. Unlike Adragna, who wore sensible traveler’s clothes, she stood pristine in white robes. A white hood shadowed her face, but Cenn could still see her grin; her teeth were very white against the crystalline dark purple of her skin. “If you really didn’t believe me, you wouldn’t have brought him aboard.”

“Hmph.” Adragna turned away. “You said you’d take care of him, so take care of him.”

The nocturne nodded, and Adragna left the wagon.

“So,” said the nocturne, coming and sitting on the floor beside Cenn. He flinched away, though something in his mind suggested that he wasn’t so much afraid of her as he was afraid of  _ himself _ , and what he might do to her. She didn’t comment on it. “You’ve made a bit of a mess, haven’t you? Let me take care of that.”

Cenn made an incoherent protest as she reached for the black puddle on the blankets, touched a single finger to it -- and it vanished, leaving the blankets dry and slightly fragrant beneath him, as if freshly laundered. While Cenn froze, trying to process this, the nocturne picked up his head; as she ran her hands over his skin, the sludge vanished from it. She combed her fingers through his long, thick hair, almost tenderly, until it was clean. Someone had spent a good deal of time and effort washing and brushing his hair recently, he realized; in his last memories it was matted, filthy. He wondered if it had been this nocturne, if she was the only one willing to touch him.

“My name is Frip,” she said, helping him sit upright, against the wall, with blankets piled behind him as a cushion. “These are the Fabulists. I don’t usually travel with them, but, well … Let’s say I had a feeling they’d need my talents on this trip.”

“Your talents?” Cenn rasped. He struggled to find words. “Can you … help me?”

“I can.” She brushed his hair out of his eyes. Much more physical contact than he was used to, than he was comfortable with. He pulled away.

“Why?” His voice was getting stronger. “What do you want from me?”

He knew no one would help him for free. No one would pick up such a sorry, filthy, Shade-tainted wreck and do the unpleasant work of cleaning him up without an ulterior motive. The last people who’d taken him in -- he pushed the memory away.

Frip considered the question. “Well, see, the Fabulists are nice, and I like you.”

“You don’t know me.”  _ I don’t even know me _ .  _ Not anymore. _

“I’m a very good judge of character,” Frip said, grinning. Then she became a little more solemn: “Don’t worry about it. We like to help people in need, and oh, I just happen to have the exact skill set to lend you a hand. Lucky you, right?”

Cenn looked at her for a long moment. What had she said?  _ I had a feeling we’d find something interesting? _ That didn’t make him feel lucky. The Collectors had found him  _ interesting _ too. But from the way Adragna spoke, without Frip’s intervention, he would be a dried-out corpse in the desert right now. Part of him wondered if that might turn out to be a better outcome than whatever lay in store for him now. The Fabulists seemed charitable, but if they decided that charity was better spent on dragons who weren’t irredeemably Shade-touched -- if they decided he needed to be  _ contained _ … 

“Can you cure me?” Cenn asked, voice low. He didn’t expect a yes.

And he didn’t get one. Frip’s smile faded. “No.”

“But you can … help me?”

The smile returned, accompanied by a nod. “I can keep your Shade under control, under wraps, and uninfectious.”

“What do I have to do?” They were circling back around to his first question, Cenn realized. “What do you want in return?”

“I’m not asking for anything in  _ exchange _ , understand, but there are certain conditions to making this work,” Frip said. Cenn felt his own eyes narrow:  _ here we go _ . “I’ll need to monitor and maintain the enchantment suppressing your Shade on a regular schedule; it’s not a one-time deal. And we can’t be neighbors, because the City Sidere really isn’t fond of the Shade. But the Fabulists are willing to take you on, once I make sure you’re not dripping Shade everywhere.”

“Take me on?” Cenn frowned, mentally rummaging among the various names and pieces of information he’d gleaned from their conversation. It was difficult: he hadn’t exactly received a lot of clear explanations. “The Fabulists. Who are they?”

“Traveling storytellers and entertainers,” Frip replied. “There’s four of them right now -- you’d be the fifth. That’s not counting me; I usually stay home in Sidere. If you’re interested in joining them, we should get Adragna and Criston in here to talk you through it. They’re in charge on the road.”

“I have to join the Fabulists for you to help me?” Cenn said.

“Let’s say I strongly recommend it.” The smile Frip gave him was sweet and quite insistent. He didn’t protest further. “Why don’t I leave you to rest for a while, then bring Adragna and Criston in to talk to you?”

Cenn didn’t think it was really a suggestion. He nodded. At a certain level, he was relieved just to see Frip go -- relieved to be alone once more, to not have to worry about how he appeared to Frip, what she might be thinking, what she might do to him.

By the time the door opened again, Cenn had dozed off, slumping over amid his blankets. When the sound woke him, he tried to sit up too fast and overbalanced, falling amid the pile. But he was starting to feel a little better; at least, he was able to prop himself up on one arm this time. He pulled the blankets over his chest, suddenly ashamed of his half-naked state -- not to mention a little cold.

He’d already met Adragna, so the shorter banescale who followed her into the room with a bright smile must have been Criston. His smile was different from Frip’s -- more open, missing a certain ironic element that Cenn had noticed in the nocturne’s expression, as if she were constantly on the verge of laughing at a private joke.

“Hello!” Criston said, plopping down on the floor in front of Cenn and raising his arm as if he were about to offer his hand to shake. Adragna, sitting down next to him, pushed his arm down and pulled him back a good few inches, out of Cenn’s reach. Cenn didn’t truly begrudge her the precautions; her eyes were hard, as she looked at him, but not hostile. “You’re Cenn, correct? My name is Criston, and my partner here is Adragna. Oh, and you’ve met Frip.”

The nocturne sat down behind the two banescales, off to her right. She folded her legs under her robe and nodded as Criston mentioned her, but her hood fell over her face, leaving it in shadow.

“I have to admit you’ve made me quite curious!” Criston said, with an exuberance that seemed to come naturally to him.  _ Storytellers and entertainers _ , Frip had said, and Cenn could see Criston on stage already; even in the small wagon, he spoke as if to an audience. “I can’t wait to hear your story!”

Cenn tried, with middling success, not to show how Criston’s curiosity made his stomach clench. “I don’t have a story.”

“Something left you wandering the desert,” Adragna said, somewhere between encouraging and skeptical. “You didn’t just fall out of the sky.”

“And if you did, that would make a good story in and of itself,” Criston said cheerfully. “And beyond that -- how did you encounter the Shade?”

Reluctantly, Cenn thought back, but his memories grew too painful, dark, fractured -- he had to give up long before he got to the cause of his infection. “I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Criston looked so disappointed that Cenn almost felt bad, almost wanted to try again to come up with something to please him. But then Adragna cut in with a sigh: “Well, if you’re not going to pay your way with stories, I suppose we  _ could _ use a spare hand around the wagons. Fetching, carrying, maybe some simple repairs. You in?”

A surge of misplaced pride protested the idea of spending his life in menial labor, but Cenn suppressed it easily. It was far too late for pride. More importantly … Gaining an unskilled laborer -- and a sickly, weak one at that -- wasn’t worth the risk of being around him with the Shade in his veins. Either this was a form of charity, helping him for minimal return because he clearly could not make any better, or they had some ulterior motive in mind.

It didn’t matter. Cenn let his head drop, looking at Frip under his hair -- but her hood hid her eyes, obscured her expression. His voice came out low, broken: “I’ll do whatever you want. I have no choice.”

“You have a choice,” Adragna said, a sharp note in her voice. “Give us the word, and we’ll leave you at the next settlement.”

Cenn croaked out a bitter chuckle, imagining how that would go. “With my Shade?”

Frip spoke up at last: “The spells I’ve already cast on you would keep you uninfectious and … mostly functional for a few weeks, if you wanted to take your chances seeking help elsewhere.”

_ If you wanted _ , not  _ if you want _ : she already knew what his answer would be. Even in the unlikely case that he could find help before Frip’s spell wore off, who knew what price  _ they _ might ask of him? He shook his head and repeated, “I’ll do whatever you want.”

Adragna frowned down at him, and Criston looked sidelong at his partner, a question in his eyes that Cenn couldn’t quite decipher. He didn’t understand why they seemed displeased with his answer; what else was he supposed to promise them?

At last Adragna exhaled. “All right. You’ll get room, board, and a stipend, same as Rhorlak and Maddock. Frip, I assume you can hide him when we come into Sidere?”

“Yep,” Frip said.

“Then that’s all.” The authority in Adragna’s voice was unshakeable. “We’ll leave you to rest, Cenn. Sleep well.”

He wouldn’t.


End file.
